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Overview
Following the extraordinary success of her novel Veronica, Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories--her first in more than ten years.In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child; and in “The Arms and Legs of the Lake,” the fallout of the Iraq war becomes disturbingly real for the disparate passengers on a train going up the Hudson--three veterans, a liberal editor, a soldier’s uncle, and honeymooners on their way to Niagara Falls.
Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body--or of the intelligent body with the craving mind--that is characteristic of Gaitskill’s fiction. As intense as Bad Behavior, her first collection of stories, Don’t Cry reflects the profound enrichment of life experience. As the stories unfold against the backdrop of American life over the last thirty years, they describe how our social conscience has evolved while basic human truths--“the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the basement, holding up the house,” as one character puts it--remain unchanged.
Synopsis
Mary Gaitskill returns with a luminous new collection of stories—her first in more than ten years. In “College Town l980,” young people adrift in Ann Arbor debate the meaning of personal strength at the start of the Reagan era; in the urban fairy tale “Mirrorball,” a young man steals a girl’s soul during a one-night stand; in “The Little Boy,” a woman haunted by the death of her former husband is finally able to grieve through a mysterious encounter with a needy child. Each story delivers the powerful, original language, and the dramatic engagement of the intelligent mind with the craving body—or of the intelligent body with the craving mind—that has come to be seen as stunningly emblematic of Gaitskill’s fiction.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Mary Gaitskill walks into a bar, accompanied by no Irishmen, rabbis, ducks, or humorous guide dogs, and -- the place empties. Choked-off laughter hanging in the air; on the counter the bartender's cloth abandoned mid-swipe. Receding sound of scuttling feet. Outside it's late winter, with dirty snow piled in the streets like the residue of some vast industrial process. She sweeps the scene with a hard and genderless eye. Heh heh. Everybody's afraid of her.
Well, I exaggerate of course. Gaitskill is probably an excellent woman to have a drink with, precisely because her fiction is so damned harsh -- writing works like that sometimes. But her professional aura, at least, is forbidding. Since Bad Behavior appeared in 1988, she has been the laureate of everything nameless, faulty, and unredeemed in American manners. Harps do not chime nor bluebirds trill when her men and women get together; instead we hear rough sex through the drywall, and the noise of meshing pathologies. Trouble, always trouble; her avenging muse is merciless. Her short story "Secretary" was made into the 2002 film of the same name -- not a great film, although it supplied the culture with the image of James Spader, taut-jawed and dragon-nostrilled, bending Maggie Gyllenhaal over his desk to give her a good spanking.
Editorials
Kathryn Harrison
No writer understands and gratifies the voyeurism inherent in reading fiction better than Mary Gaitskill. Don't Cry,…confirms what made Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To such idiosyncratic and memorable books. She has a perturbing ability to generate what seems as much a vivisection as a narrative, slicing through her characters to expose interior lives that are more often "broken or incomplete" than in any way admirable…Because her subject is intimacy, often but not necessarily sexual, because she has a gift for inventing details that feel authentic, as if excised from an unwitting, living victim, Mary Gaitskill commands her readers' attention as few fiction writers can.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
A grab bag of 10 stories spotlight the writhing of Gaitskill's (Veronica) listless characters within unloving landscapes. In the portrayal of a depressive 29-year-old graduate student trying to pick up her life after a shattering breakup, "College Town, 1980," set in Ann Arbor, encapsulates the collective self-abnegation that seized America's young on the cusp of the Reagan revolution. "The Agonized Face" is a rigorous critique of a feminist author who manipulates her audience "with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her." Mostly, though, characters give in to nostalgia rather than anger, like the medical technician in "A Dream of Men" whose bittersweet memories of her dying father mingle with her ambivalence about her sexuality; or a now-married middle-aged writer's touching encounter with a stylish former lesbian lover she had 15 years before. The title story's protagonist, a recent widow accompanying her friend to adopt a baby in an unstable Addis Ababa, is nearly submerged by her guilt at having been once unfaithful to her husband, but like others in Gaitskill's pristinely rendered yet joyless gallery, she finds visceral gratitude in unexpected moments. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Readers may find it difficult to adhere to the title's admonition as they navigate the devastating territory covered in Gaitskill's latest collection after PEN/Faulkner nominee Because They Wanted to. With "College Town, 1980," "Folk Song," and "A Dream of Men," the author revisits themes of sexual abuse and its resulting trauma. In "Mirror Ball," readers are treated to a hauntingly magical depiction of a one-night stand where, as the young couple climax, the girl offers her soul to the unwitting boy, with lonely repercussions. For this reviewer, the most powerful story is "The Arms and Legs of the Lake," in which Gaitskill uses a stream-of-consciousness style to take us inside the heads of Iraq War veterans, strangers on a train, struggling to reconnect with their humanity while violent images invade their psyches. While this collection won't be every reader's cup of tea, the author's exquisite use of language and metaphor is enough to recommend it for all libraries with a serious literary bent. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/15/08.]
—Sally Bissell
Kirkus Reviews
Gaitskill (Veronica, 2005, etc.) returns with a fierce and fearless collection of stories. In the most successful pieces, Gaitskill explores the involutions and intertwinings of sex, intimacy and family. "Folk Song" consists of a chilling series of links among newspaper stories about a sadistic killer, a woman who vows to have sex with a thousand men in a row and a pair of endangered turtles stolen from a zoo. In "Mirror Ball," a boy steals a girl's soul during a one-night stand. "The Agonized Face," about a journalist's encounter with a famous feminist author who was once a prostitute, provides an account at once ruthless and exquisitely sensitive of the ways a public identity can be both refuge and trap, haven and hair shirt. Many of these stories-a notable exception is the grim, taut title story, about a middle-aged woman searching Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a child to adopt-are less traditional fictions than essays in fictive form, occasions for Gaitskill to meditate on the darkness and contradictions of Eros. There's too much insider writing-program stuff, and a few pieces fall flat, but Gaitskill has a rare talent for uncovering, with a near-impossible combination of compassion and pitilessness, what lies beneath the surfaces we work hard to make placid. Another accomplished collection from an American original. Agent: Jin Auh/The Wylie AgencyThe Barnes & Noble Review
Mary Gaitskill walks into a bar, accompanied by no Irishmen, rabbis, ducks, or humorous guide dogs, and -- the place empties. Choked-off laughter hanging in the air; on the counter the bartender's cloth abandoned mid-swipe. Receding sound of scuttling feet. Outside it's late winter, with dirty snow piled in the streets like the residue of some vast industrial process. She sweeps the scene with a hard and genderless eye. Heh heh. Everybody's afraid of her.Well, I exaggerate of course. Gaitskill is probably an excellent woman to have a drink with, precisely because her fiction is so damned harsh -- writing works like that sometimes. But her professional aura, at least, is forbidding. Since Bad Behavior appeared in 1988, she has been the laureate of everything nameless, faulty, and unredeemed in American manners. Harps do not chime nor bluebirds trill when her men and women get together; instead we hear rough sex through the drywall, and the noise of meshing pathologies. Trouble, always trouble; her avenging muse is merciless. Her short story "Secretary" was made into the 2002 film of the same name -- not a great film, although it supplied the culture with the image of James Spader, taut-jawed and dragon-nostrilled, bending Maggie Gyllenhaal over his desk to give her a good spanking.
"There's no love in you because there's no sex in you," a man tells a woman in "College Town, 1980," the first story in Gaitskill's collection Don't Cry. In context, in the floating world of dropouts, pill poppers, gas passers, and ambulant trainwrecks that the story conjures up, a remark like this is mere domestic chit-chat -- pillow talk, almost. It continues: "Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this ... pornography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a faggot!" ("You ass-wipe," rejoins the woman, conversationally.)
"Folk Song" examines a single page of newsprint: on it are items about the torture/murder of a mother and her daughter, the robbery of two giant turtles from the Bronx Zoo, and the preparations of a porn star for a 1,000-man gang bang. Might these apparently disparate violations be somehow related? They might indeed, as Gaitskill cues up a reverie in her own special style -- the style of Gender-Studies-on-Acid. "When she began to have sex with boys, it was as if she were picking up a doll marked 'Girl' and a doll marked 'Boy' and banging them together, hoping to unite herself. As she grew older, the woman inside her became more insatiable and the man more angry. He became angry enough to kill." As for the poor turtles, "it is likely [they] have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells." Likely? It's a freaking certainty.
But Gaitskill doesn't overwrite. On the contrary, one feels that even at her most gaudily negative she is restraining herself with some severity: her sentences make sense because she has demanded that they make sense. "The fog lolled in the sky, sluggish as a fat white woman on rumpled sheets." This is terrible, of course, but then -- when you give it a moment's thought -- so is "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table..." These strained, alien images win our trust somehow: their closeness to the inexpressible authenticates them. And they can just as easily be beautiful: "The plane turned on the runway like a live thing slowly turning in heavy water."
Gaitskill is more than half poet. The natural state of her writing is a kind of scalding fluidity, a slipping between the outer world and the unconscious that achieves its triumph, in Don't Cry, in the story "Mirror Ball" -- which also represents the consummation of her prolonged literary dalliance with that excellent weirdo Hans Christian Andersen. The Danish fabulist has pranced through Gaitskill's work on nutcracker legs (his "Little Match Girl" was a motif in both Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Veronica), and in "Mirror Ball" she appropriates his spooky ultra-metaphorical late style to narrate the story of a girl who accidentally, and with no idea of what she is doing, gives a boy her soul. The boy is equally clueless: "He weighed her good qualities as he walked home in the interesting light of 4:00 a.m., but he did it like a man counting pocket change, yawning and half-interested. When he got home, Hunger yawned, too. He dropped her soul on the floor, where it quickly became invisible to him. He forgot her." But the soul will not be so neglected -- the story goes on, breeding its perceptions, a thing of sustained hallucinatory intensity and an absolute knockout.
Don't Cry is beautifully sequenced, like a vintage rock album, and "Mirror Ball" is the sprawling jam that completes the wreckage of Side One. Side Two is soberer and more measured, a journey into meaning -- into love, unexpectedly. "The Arms and Legs of the Lake" jump-cuts the interior monologues of a group of railway passengers as they react in their various ways to a slightly out-of-control Iraq war vet. ("Tell me brother, can you -- what is this body of water out the window here?" "This is the Hudson River." "It is? I thought it was the Great Lakes.") Reality deepens around this man, but he is clearly, at this moment, beyond saving. Salvation remains a possibility, though: the title story, the last in the book, is a grueling and moving account of an attempt by two American women to transact the adoption of an Ethiopian baby boy. They are smart, experienced, and illusionless, and in the streets and orphanages of Addis Ababa they are put through purgatorial fire. Plenty of stuff is charred and drops away, but life, gristly indomitable life, turns out to be what's left over. Who knew? --James Parker
James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press), and a correspondent for The Atlantic.